Metamorphosis a stunner for the heart and the head
Retelling of Kafka’s cockroach classic gets Canadian debut at High Performance Rodeo

Stephen Hunt, Calgary Herald01.11.2013

Photo courtesy High Performance Rodeo
Gigli Orn Gardarsson plays Gregor Samsa, the salesman who wakes up to discover he’s an insect, in Metamorphosis, at the 2013 High Performance Rodeo

Photo courtesy High Performance Rodeo
Iceland’s Versturport Theatre and London’s Lyric Hammersmith are presenting the Canadian premiere of Metamorphosis at the 2013 High Performance Rodeo in Calgary, Alberta.

Photo courtesy High Performance Rodeo
Ingvar E Sigurdsson plays Herman, the Samsa family patriarch, in Metamorphosis, at the 2013 High Performance Rodeo in Calgary.

That’s the acting challenge faced by Gisli Orn Gardarsson, the talented Icelandic actor who plays Gregor Samsa in Versturport and the Lyric Hammersmith’s stunning theatrical adaptation of Franz Kafka’s literary classic, which opened Wednesday night in the middle of a flash blizzard at the Max Bell Theatre.

Thanks to an ingenious set design (by Borkur Jonsson), which takes a fairly standard split-level set and turns one of the upstairs bedrooms into a gravity-defying den of metaphoric horror, Gardarsson makes the transformation from travelling salesman Samsa to giant insect in a way that’s extraordinarily moving.

That’s the key to igniting the conflict at the core of Metamorphosis, which tells the story of the Samsa family, a lower middle-class German unit whose carefully cultivated sense of themselves gets thrown for a loop the morning they wake to discover that not only has Gregor, the family breadwinner, missed his five a.m. commuter train to work, but oh yeah, BTW — he’s upstairs in his room, chattering unintelligibly and he’s a cockroach.

Awkward!

It’s pretty much a comic premise and in the early going, Metamorphosis plays off that broad sight gag, producing an odd sort of northern European social satire — The Simpsons, if they came from Dusseldorff instead of Springfield, Mo.

That might sound odd, but there’s patriarch Herman (Ingvar E Sigurdsson), a doting, eccentric mom (Kelly Hunter), and adult sister Greta (Nina Dogg Filippusdottir), all of whom share a humble home to make ends meet, as times are rather tough.

Herman’s self-esteem has been shattered by a business failure some years earlier, causing him to micro-manage every aspect of his family’s domestic life, all while railing about the absence of respect from the outside world, or inside world, for that matter.

The family’s only saving grace, their lifeline, is Gregor, who rises in the middle of the night to catch the five o’clock train into town, to be at the office by seven o’clock, to impress his superiors and ascend the corporate ladder.

Until the day Gregor awakes, feeling unwell after a night of disturbing dreams, to discover that he’s now a giant insect.

It’s a little bit more jarring than it is funny — you find yourself thinking, ‘That’s funny!’ rather than actually laughing — but it turns out Metamorphosis has just as much heart as it has head.

For one thing, while the scenario is surreal, the emotional reaction of the family to the upheaval caused by Gregor’s transformation is played dead straight.

For all of his buffoonishness, Sigurdsson’s Herman is as sincere and committed to his world view as a man could possibly be — a kind of Willy Loman-esque belief that you are what the world perceives you to be — which is pretty universal, at least in the West, in its sentiment.

Scene by scene, the family tries to normalize their new reality, but mostly by repressing and denying and finally, scapegoating Gregor for what he’s become.

Although Kafka wrote Metamorphosis prior to the outbreak of the First World War, it’s not hard to spot the echoes of what Germany was to experience over the next four decades, as that country sought ever newer and more horrific ways to deal with economic trauma and the question of its national identity.

It’s all directed (by Gardarsson and David Farr) with a certain stylish melancholy, from the drabness of their home to the beautiful, weeping soundtrack (by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis) that made me think of films such as Babette’s Feast and The Tin Drum.

All of that, set against Gardarsson’s performance, which combines the physical demands of an Olympic tumbling routine with a lot of nuanced, emotional detail, sets the stage for Metamorphosis’ devastating finale, when Gregor breaks free of his upstairs prison just in time to shock the hell out of Greta’s gentleman caller.

Since its 2006 debut in London (it’s returning there following its Calgary run), Metamorphosis has been an international sensation, playing everywhere from Moscow to Seoul to New York and Reykjavik. The High Performance Rodeo marks the Canadian debut of the work of Vesturport and the Lyric Hammersmith. Lucky us.

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Metamorphosis a stunner for the heart and the head
Retelling of Kafka’s cockroach classic gets Canadian debut at High Performance Rodeo

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